


The Zoobox

by OldChum



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fantastic Beasts, Flappers, Jazz Age, Mystery, New York in the 1920's
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-26
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 09:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10739196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldChum/pseuds/OldChum
Summary: "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" rewritten by a history nut obsessed with 20th century America. Some elements are the same, some elements are different. If you're looking for an interesting twist on the canon, this fic is for you! If you were disappointed the setting wasn't more fully integrated into the plot, this fic is for you! If you want to read something while you wait for the bus, this fic is for you!





	1. The Ghost, The Clock, and The Disgraced Auror

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I love JK Rowling, I get the impression that her 1920's New York has less to do with 1920's New York and more to do with post-9/11 paranoia and modern American issues. That, to me, is a shame. The Jazz Age was such an interesting and tumultuous time, particularly in urban areas, seeing how a wizarding community would interact with that era is a fascinating prospect. This is my attempt to stay true to the basic premise of Newt Scamander's adventure, but with significant changes to Magical America that more accurately reflect what was going down in '26, and a few narrative twists to keep things lively.

If a muggle were to catch a glimpse of the _Golden Hinde_ as she sailed towards the skyline of New York City, they would have seen only a small, red tugboat that perhaps needed a fresh coat of paint, but was otherwise unremarkable. They would not have seen one of the British wizarding world’s most beloved institutions – a massive galleon that had first set sail in 1577 under the command of the legendary Sir Francis Drake (rumoured to have been history’s most successful squib). The story of the _Hinde_ herself, and her sister ship the _Pelican_ , is very interesting but of little importance to the tale you are reading. What _is_ of importance is that aboard this enchanted and gilded vessel, a reedy, bookish man with red hair and a faded school scarf was trying not to throw up.

Newt Scamander had spent the last two weeks sailing from London to New York. It had been a more reliable and expedient method than boarding one of the muggle ocean liners, and all of the passengers and crew were magical folk, so it had been easier to make conversation – or make up excuses to avoid conversation, as the case required. Still, he was not a sailor by nature, and it hadn’t been a very pleasant fortnight as far as his stomach was concerned.

“For Gloriana’s sake, man!” The Privateer bellowed at him, his ghostly form slowly rising through the deck to stand beside Newt, “Chew some sage! I tell you, it does the trick for ladies and young children, so it’d do you a world of good!”

“Couldn’t find any sage,” Newt mumbled, trying to fix his eyes on a steady point on the horizon. Somebody else had told him that was supposed to help with the nausea, but he couldn’t remember who it was.

“Ah, New York at last!” The Privateer announced cheerfully, jutting out his bearded chin, his pearl drop earring catching in the wind. Newt wondered how the weather could affect a ghost so much as it seemed to affect The Privateer. He always looked like he was standing on the prow of a ship in an elegant sunset breeze. It might be that it was just how he best remembered living.

“I think I should like getting some steady land under my feet again,” Newt confessed with an unsteady smile.

“Three days in port,” The Privateer nodded, “Just long enough for you to get comfortable. Terrible luck for you. Upon boarding the _Hinde_ again, you’ll be sick as a dog. Sicker. Like a greedy dog who ate an entire Lammastide feast and several of the decorative candles by mistake. You’ll be greener than a Slytherin flag on St. Patrick’s Day. Twice as bad as this, at least.”

“Oh no,” Newt groaned, “Is that really going to happen?”

“Buy some sage, lad! Markets are full of the stuff! Get it off the muggles if you have to!”

He thought grimly of all the potions he’d bought before sailing, and how useless they’d turned out to be. It was a bit strange, because he’d sailed before and even though he was certainly prone to sea sickness, it had never been so ferocious before. Perhaps it was something else upsetting him. He’d heard that a guilty heart beat twice as fast, maybe a guilty stomach churned twice as hard.

“You know, when first I saw this coastline, it was all trees and bare rock,” The Privateer sighed wistfully, floating up to the railing and looking out at the skyscrapers in the contentious race with Chicago for the title of World’s Tallest Building. “Glad somebody got their head on straight and made something of the miserable bog.”

Newt gave a noncommittal mumble. He didn’t particularly want to get into an environmental argument with a ghost, not when he was so queasy with nerves, and not when that ghost would be one of the few people in the near vicinity capable of offering Newt asylum if the American authorities decided to charge him with the major crime he was planning to commit.

“Ah! To be a young man about town in this new Golden Age!” The Privateer sighed so deeply and wistfully, Newt thought the fellow’s whole ghostly body might disappear on the winter breeze. “I say this with the deepest fondness, but such an era is wasted on you. A man can be an eccentric social outcast in any time, but this roaring, delightful world of terrifying possibility is for the adventurer.”

Newt fought down another sudden rising of his stomach acids, and shook his head.

“I have no idea how that could’ve been meant fondly.” He felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle with indignation, and all of a sudden he heard himself saying: “And I have been on my share of adventures – more than my share! I’ve been in the Middle East for the last year and a half, tracking down all manner of beast and monster, and that’s hardly been a picnic, and just because I don’t spend all my time hitting up the… the… opium dens and the brothels and the back alley potion shops…”

“Good glory, lad, that was the scene forty years ago. It’s cocaine and jazz now. Catch up.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Newt took a deep breath. “I’m trying not to be sick and it’s very aggravating.”

The Privateer gave him a sympathetic look.

“I ought not to jest with you when you’re about to reacquaint yourself with your breakfast. You’ll like New York. I’m sure there’s a library of some sort and plenty of places to buy an ice cold pint of milk, then back here for Christmas! We usually have a plum pudding, so you can look forward to chucking that back up somewhere around the West Indies.”

Newt laughed, despite himself. He liked the bombastic old ghost, even though there were plenty of reasons not to. The Privateer laughed too.

The _Golden Hinde_ docked not long after that, the gangplank lowered, and a crowd of British wizards and witches disembarked in an orderly fashion.

Newt Scamander, still sea sick and much sweatier than he ever would have liked, held the smooth handle of his worn leather suitcase with a vice’s grip. The blood was drained right out of all the fingers on the grasping hand, and he was certain to have a cramp in cold weather for the rest of his life if he didn’t ease up soon.

A cluster of friendly faces waited at one set of doors to greet a few of the passengers. Some of them had signs with names written on them lazily bobbing in the air, waiting to be claimed.

“Don’t forget to pace yourself, my boy!” The Privateer called in his grandest voice, and Newt felt his shoulders involuntarily rise with discomfort. “If you’re not back in three days, I’ll send a man round to the opium dens and brothels to fetch you!”

The tips of Newt’s ears turned bright pink, and he did his best to not look up from his shoes at any point from that time on, in the hopes of never knowing how many people had given him judgemental looks.

Though the _Hinde_ had been the most recent to land, she was far from the only ship dropping off passengers in New York that day. As Newt pushed open the sleek glass doors that led to the special branch of the Port Authority for magically inclined travellers, he was greeted by a symphony of a thousand voices from all over the world.

The building had been constructed in the early nineteenth century as a trading center for magical imports. It had enormous stone columns, high domed glass ceilings that let in rays of cheerful sunshine – magically produced, no doubt, given that the sky was grey and fat with coming rain outside – and significantly more traffic than Newt was expecting. He soon found himself jostled by a flow of human traffic into the center of the room, surrounded by languages and questions he couldn’t even begin to translate.

“The water was very choppy today, wasn’t it?” A woman behind him asked.

Newt turned with a polite smile on his face and was just about to answer when he realized she was talking to someone else. He kept the smile on his face and hurried past the pair, pretending he’d seen someone he recognized in the crowd beyond.

He noticed an enormous art nouveau clock hanging over a cluster of benches. The clock’s face was surrounded by a wreath of lilies, beneath which a nymph-like woman sculpted from bronze lounged in a Grecian gown. The metalwork maiden stretched her arms over her head with a yawn, and then announced in a melodious voice:

“Newly _disembarked_ passengers _may_ expect a processing delay of forty minutes. _Thank you_ for your patience. _Newly_ disembarked _passengers_ may expect a processing _delay_ of forty minutes, thank you for your _patience_.” 

Forty minutes? Newt’s heart sank as his grip on his suitcase tightened back up. Any number of things could go wrong in forty minutes. He spun around, trying to regain his bearings and saw that almost everyone in the room was generally aiming themselves in the direction of a line of desks. A wooden barricade made of bureaucracy, standing between all new arrivals and freedom to move about the city.

Over their heads, suspended by magic, were green and white signs that had the same sort of writing on them Newt recognized from American dime novels with titles like: “Daring Dermont and the Fastest Duelist in the West” and “Gold Hunting with the Goblins of the High Sierras.” Only the signs said very mundane things like: “Immigration Applications” and “Returning Citizens” and, most worryingly, “Baggage Processing.”

Newt’s baggage was a problem.

It was his biggest problem.

It was likely to become the biggest problem the Port Authority had seen in its five years of existence, and perhaps the biggest problem its magical branch ever would see.

Overwhelmed with the place, the process, and the prospect of being arrested at some point in the next hour, Newt made his way to one of the benches beneath the clock, and crumpled onto it in a heap. He kept his case on his lap, and stared dazedly at the “Baggage Processing” sign.

The sitting area beneath the clock smelled of lilies and fresh grass.

“You look terribly upset,” the maiden beneath the clock said. Newt looked up and noticed her dangling off the side of her perch upside down. She had the languid boredom of a teenage girl on a rainy day, and was considerably larger than she’d appeared from across the room.

“M-me?” Newt asked, glancing around with the fervent hope that she wasn’t speaking too loudly or drawing too much attention to him. Luckily, most people seemed too concerned with their own business to pay any mind to anyone else.

“Of course you! You look upset. And confused about where you’re supposed to go, and possibly broken hearted and definitely ill. Which ship did you come in on?” The maiden swung her long bronze arms over her head, so that her daintily proportioned but quite sizeable fingertips grazed the air by Newt’s face.

“Uhm,” Newt cleared his throat, “the _Hinde_. The _Golden Hinde_.”

“Oh. You’re English, then?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Swiss. I think I’m supposed to be an Ancient Greek, but I was made in Switzerland. The whole clock was. I was a gift of international good will, though, so I’m really just American. I’ve never lived anywhere but New York City.” She rolled her wrist dreamily, “Are you visiting? Or are you coming to live here?”

“Visiting,” Newt answered, in no way relaxing into the conversation. It still didn’t seem as though anyone was too fussed about the clock chatting with him, but he wasn’t at all sure how long that would last.

“Then that’s the line you want,” she twisted herself into a slightly more upright position and pointed to a cluster of desks and the queue in front of them.

“Thank you!” Newt practically leapt from the bench and hurried in the direction she pointed out.

“You’re welcome!”

It was an agonizingly long two minutes before someone else fell into the line behind him and he at last lost the feeling of the bronze clock maiden staring at the back of his head. He imagined that it must be dull for her to hang from the ceiling and recite time tables all day. Ordinarily he would’ve tried to be more courteous about the whole thing, but she was being conspicuous and he did _not_ want to be conspicuous.

The tedium of the line was a new hell.

Half an hour of steadily inching forward, staring nervously at the green sign and wondering what “processing” was going to entail. In Britain, when a new wizard or witch visited from overseas they were given a quick once over for cursed objects and sent on their way. Most of the countries Newt had visited since being assigned by the Ministry to write his field guide had been very laid back about letting him through. Then again, in those instances, national regulations had usually been of little relevance to him and his suitcase. The United States of America was a different proposition.

He was still defensively clutching his case to his chest, and still staring dazedly up at the sign when his turn at the front of the line came.

Behind the empty desk sat a short, stout clerk with a sour face and a pair of pewter pince-nez. He had an almost oppressive air of tidiness about him, and an unmistakable aura of impatience.

“Step forward, please,” he said to Newt.

Still lost in his thoughts, Newt didn’t notice.

The clerk sighed with annoyance, and took up a very slight and surprisingly delicate looking wand – it was about the size of a fountain pen, and had a band of marble set into the wood – and flicked it towards Newt. The spell hit Newt like an invisible wire was pulling him forward by the corners of his bowtie, and before he knew it he was standing in front of the desk trying not to look too guilty or too bewildered.

“Sir,” the clerk said, “we do not have time for you to twiddle your thumbs and daydream. We are busy people, and we like things to be done quickly. Passport.”

“I’m very sorry. It’s been a long morning and I’m still a bit seasick and it’s very noisy in here and crowded.”

“Your passport, _sir_.”

Newt patted his pockets, until he finally produced both his muggle passport and his Wizarding one and put them both on the desk. The clerk eyed the muggle one with the same disdain that might have crossed his face if someone had put a used handkerchief in front of him. He took his wand very carefully used it to slide the offending document back towards Newt. He then picked up the Wizarding passport and began to examine it.

“How long will you be staying in New York?”

“Three days. I’m on the _Golden Hinde_ , you see, and we’re just picking up passengers and supplies and then heading down and around,” he drew a course on an imaginary map in the air, “and I’m trying to get to San Francisco.”

The clerk looked a little puzzled.

“You can take a train to San Francisco from New York. It takes less time.”

Newt nervously twisted the edge of his grey and yellow scarf between his fingers.

“I don’t like trains. I… had a bad experience.”

“And boats make you seasick?” The clerk recalled, raising an eyebrow and thumbing through the passport to see the wide variety of stamps that had collected over the last few years. “By the looks of things, you travel a great deal despite these eccentricities, why is that, Mr. Scamander?”

“I’m a scientist. A magizoologist. I’ve been commissioned by the Ministry of Magic to write a guide to magical creatures in their natural habitats. I’m a Ministry employee.”

The clerk nodded, his eyes drifting from Newt’s uneasy body language to the leather case. “And are you aware, sir, that the United States of America has strict regulations about bringing non-native wildlife into the country? I’m sure you heard about the recent trouble our Australian cousins had with the puffskeins. We try to avoid that kind of thing here.”

“Yes, well, that’s the result of an exotic species being released into the wild, isn’t it? Domestic pets, well cared for and properly monitored shouldn’t be a problem—“

“Do you have any domestic pets with you, sir?”

“No!” He answered, too quickly and too loudly.

“No owls, ravens, bats, black cats, or similar?”

“Bats? Do you keep bats as familiars here? How fascinating!” Newt said with a nervous chuckle.

“Open your case for me, sir.” The clerk replied, with absolutely no kind of chuckle at all.

Desperately hoping that his high-end locking charm would hold, Newt unlatched the case and turned it towards the clerk. All that could be seen was a stack of shirts, a toothbrush, an H. Rider Haggard novel, and a bundle of socks. The clerk gave Newt an unconvinced glance.

“Pack light, don’t we? Not even a spare wand or potion or two.”

“Best to avoid suspicion from the muggles, and it _is_ only three days.” Newt decided not to elaborate on the British philosophy of wand-ownership, the clerk was likely not interested.

“Mr. Scamander, I am about to cast several unbinding spells on this suitcase,” the clerk told him with the dry disinterest that comes from repeating something many times in many different situations. “Things will go much more smoothly for you if you confess now, because there is very little that can withstand the scrutiny of American Magic. Is there anything you would like to tell me?”

Newt cleared his throat, looked from his suitcase to his passport, to the wand in the clerk’s hand, blinked unsteadily, but held fast to his plan to be deceptive and uncooperative. It wasn’t because he wanted to cause trouble, he in fact wanted to cause the opposite of trouble, but it seemed very complicated to try and explain that to the clerk.

“It’s just a suitcase,” he smiled politely.

There was a rapid-firing of charms and spells, zaps from the pen-like wand, hand-movements Newt didn’t recognize, something that sounded like Greek rather than Latin, and a small burst of ghostly red fire.

Nothing happened.

The clerk looked extremely displeased.

“See? Nothing to worry about,” Newt smiled, and hoped the droplet of sweat forming on his temple wasn’t noticeable.

The clerk, with a suspicious expression on his face, did not reply. He simply raised his wand with the tip pointing straight up and gave it a quick twirl. Above the desk, next to the hovering sign, a glowing red hand appeared, pointing downward at them, like an illuminated sigil. This did not make Newt feel comfortable.

Upon the hand’s appearance, a young man in a well-tailored blue suit and highly polished white shoes sauntered over. His hair was held in place with glistening pomade, and he had a very fashionable and thin moustache. He looked very much like he’d stepped out of one of the photographs accompanying a magazine article about Harlem conjurers Newt had read on the boat.

“Trouble, Mr. Ignatio?” The young man asked the clerk.

“Stay with Mr. Scamander, Bartleby,” the clerk replied. “I need to have a small conversation with Mac. It won’t take long.”

Without another word to Newt, he pushed out his chair, stood up, and hurried towards a collection of office doors on the other side of the building. The back of his head soon disappeared between the crowded lines and busy desks.

“You don’t look like a cursed objects peddler,” Bartleby, the young man left standing with Newt, observed.

“…Thank you?”

“So, what is it, then? Running booze for the mundies?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Bringing in illegal potions? Hobgoblin hoops? Devil’s doozies? Myrrhicles? Rum punchers? Brass Cockerels?”

“I don’t know what any of those things are.”

“Draggers? Blenders? Unicorn blood?”

“NO!” Newt said, very firmly. “Definitely not that.”

Bartleby shrugged, and went quiet.

The pause didn’t last very long.

“It can’t be Haitian powder.”

“Look, please, I’m very nervous about what’s happening and very confused, so if it’s not too much trouble, can you please stop saying random words at me?” Newt asked, staring at his suitcase and wondering if he could get away with running back to the _Hinde_.

“You’re from England, huh?” Bartleby asked, eyeballing the striped scarf. “Well, you’re going to have to learn a whole new kind of English if you’re going to get by around here. But New Yorkers are friendly, so if you get confused by the slang, just ask somebody. Assuming, of course, Mac doesn’t throw you in the tank for doping the bones.”

Newt had no idea what that was, but he didn’t want it to happen.

The clerk made his way back across the floor, but he wasn’t returning alone. Behind him a tall, sandy-haired man in a grey wool suit strode confidently through the crowd. Despite his somewhat prdinary appearance, he seemed more like a military tactician or a duelist of some bygone age than the sort of person that might ask you questions about your luggage.

He gave Newt a lopsided, courteous smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Mr. Scamander, my name is Malachy Mac Conmara and I’m from the Federal Bureau of Aurors,” he circled the desk slowly and scrutinized the open suitcase, the way a jeweller might scrutinize a raw diamond before beginning his cut, and rapped the side of it with the flat of his knuckle. “I hear you’re a magizoologist, is that right?”

There was a lilt to his voice, an Irish accent that had long been worn into an American one, the way vibrant colours fade over time.

“Yes, that’s right,” Newt nodded.

“I see. If you wouldn’t mind following me, please,” he said with disingenuous courtesy, “Bartleby will bring your things.”

For lack of any other obvious recourse, Newt complied.

They made a striking trio, Mac leading the way to the office doors he’d been summoned out of, Newt following next, looking down at the floor with an expression of great distress, and Bartelby behind them with his hands in his pockets. Newt’s luggage and paperwork bobbed along in the air beside him in a quarantining aura of blue mist. The crowd on the other sides of the desks quickly averted their gaze and whispered speculations about Newt and what he may or may not have done.

“What brings you to the United States, Mr. Scamander?” Mac asked over his shoulder.

“Study, mostly,” Newt tried to keep his voice relaxed as he spoke. “I’m not staying on the East Coast for long, I’m sort of passing through on my way to San Francisco.”

“After the Twins, huh?” Bartleby asked with a bitter hint of accusation.

“I’m sorry?” Newt asked.

“The Twins of the Jade City,” Mac explained, “Two Chinese dragons, a fire dragon in the hills, and a water dragon by the bay. It’s believed they were brought over as infants by railroad workers, but they’ve grown considerably and are always fighting each other. That’s why San Francisco is so foggy. Beautiful creatures, and protected by the new laws, in case you had any bright ideas about harvesting their organs.”

“You sick son of a bitch,” Bartleby shook his head, “I bet this whole case is full of xuanlong guts. Got a couple jars of livers, huh? A pancreas or two?”

Newt stopped dead in his tracks so fast, his shoes squeaked on the stone floor.

“I most certainly do not! I’ll have you know, I don’t even approve of the harvesting of heartstings for wands! And I would be a pretty poor magizoologist if I went around murdering rare creatures, regardless of any legal protections that may or may not be on them!”

He left out that he found it pretty ironic that two citizens of a country famous not only for wiping out forty species of mythical creature, but also a good number of _mundane_ creatures, should be lecturing him on hunting.

Mac raised his eyebrows in genuine surprise.

“You don’t spend much time with other magizoologists, do you?” He asked.

“I spend my time _studying_ fantastic beasts.”

“You may be surprised to learn that a fair number of your cohorts believe the study of fantastic beasts requires trapping, killing, and dissecting them, and that most magizoologists we get from England, Scotland and Wales are here to, as you put it, murder something.”

Newt couldn’t stop himself from looking betrayed and confused for a moment, before gathering his thoughts and shaking his head.

“No, that can’t be right, there must be some kind of misunderstanding. In the past that might have been true, but certainly not these days.”

Mac didn’t answer, he just turned and started walking towards the doors again, this time with a slightly quicker step.

“Certainly not these days,” Bartleby repeated with a gusty sigh and urged Newt along.

The office doors were all made of sturdy, highly polished oak. There were three rows of them, lining the entire wall, with no stairs or signs or helpful indications of any kind explaining how someone might identify the correct door and then access it.

From his inside jacket pocket, Mac produced a wand that seemed very peculiar to Newt. It was extraordinarily thin, and the base of it was made from what looked like sun-bleached drift wood, but from about the middle point on, the material changed to sea glass. Newt made a mental note to ask about American wand theory if he ever met someone friendly.

Mac raised the wand in a swift flick, then tucked it back in his pocket. From the floor beside him, a rectangular stone column rose with the steady grinding noise of rock against rock. He and Bartleby waited for it to finish with the glazed, unimpressed expressions of two people who desperately wanted their workplace to upgrade into the correct century.

A circle within a circle marked the top of the column on the side closest to the three men. From the center of it, a shrill and nasal voice asked:

“Number please?”

“Three forty-nine,” Mac replied.

At first, nothing appeared to happen. And then, all at once, the doors began flipping over and showing a reverse side identical to the front. It was like watching a massive deck of cards do a sidelong shuffle. Then it stopped. The whole thing took less than a minute, and Newt started thinking about people falling off moving staircases and down bottomless pits and being trapped in endless corridors, though he wouldn’t have been able to tell you why he was thinking of those things. He suspected it was the looming fear of imprisonment.

“Here is door three forty-nine,” the voice from inside the column said. “Have a nice day!”

The new door looked, to Newt, exactly like all of the other doors had, but Mac and Bartleby seemed satisfied that it was different. Mac swung it open and let Bartleby take the suitcase and passports in ahead of him.

“After you, Mr. Scamander.”

Newt braced himself to find a cold, concrete-walled interrogation room with a faulty glass lamp and a cracked dirty water glass – the kind of place he’d read about in the blood-and-thunder serials that ran in the back half of The Quibbler. He nodded with grim determination and stepped through the doorway into a friendly office with polished wood floors, deep green walls, tall cedar-clad windows and a roaring fire in a river rock fireplace.

He was confused, and it showed.

Mac followed him in, and as he shut the door behind him, the hustle and bustle of the port faded to a comfortable silence. The fire crackled, a winter wind howled faintly outside the windows, a distant typewriter bell rang.

A large desk sat in the middle of the room, on a diagonal that allowed the young woman sitting at it to get a good view of the three separate entrances into the office, and have her back warmed by the fire. When the door closed, she looked up from her work at Bartleby, then at Newt, then at Mac. She had bluntly cropped dark hair, a soft jaw and a delicate mouth. But what Newt noticed the most about her were her large, skeptical brown eyes.

“Sorry to interrupt you, Tina,” Mac said with an easy familiarity, “is Vasily around?”

“Depends on what’s going on…” Tina replied carefully.

Before she could get an answer, the interior office door opened and a very cheerful Buryat with a waxed moustache called out:

“I hear voices! Is this the representative from Wyoming?”

“It’s Agent Mac Conmara of the FBA,” Tina answered, locking her untrusting gaze on Newt, “he wants to talk to you about something.”

“To me? How odd,” Vasily pursed his lips and walked into the room. “What is this about? Do you want Miss Goldstein to work for you G-Wizzes again? I refuse! She is too useful! No take-backs!”

His voice was incredibly boisterous and cheerful, with a fairly thick Russian accent. Newt was surprised. He also had no idea what a G-Wiz might be, or what was going on.

“I’m afraid I’m here on an altogether more serious matter,” Mac replied, gesturing towards Newt. “This is Mr. Scamander of the British Ministry of Magic. He’s a magizoologist. He arrived in New York roughly an hour ago, and this is his suitcase. It has a very potent concealment spell on it…”

Mac’s eyes flicked towards Newt.

“Oh. I see.” Vasily replied, suddenly grim. “Perhaps we had better speak in my office.”

Mac and Newt’s luggage disappeared into the inner office, and Newt spent several uncomfortable seconds unsure of whether or not he was supposed to follow. Vasily soon clarified matters for him.

“Sit.” He pointed Newt toward a row of wooden chairs near to the fireplace, then turned to Tina. “Keep an eye on him.”

Then he closed the inner office door, and the deceptively relaxing sense of quiet returned to the room.

Tina sized Newt up with a terrifyingly perceptive gaze.

Newt sat rigidly in the designated chair, actively reminding himself to breathe.

“What did he do?” Tina asked Bartleby.

“Not sure yet. Probably trafficking creature parts—“

“I most certainly am not!” Newt didn’t mean to shout, but he did.

With a decidedly unimpressed expression on her face, Tina twisted her chair to get a better look at him.

“You decided to try and smuggle illegal goods into the busiest magical port in the world on the one day of the year Mac got stuck with customs rotation?” She asked with the tiniest spark of laughter tugging at the corner of her lips. “Buddy, who ever sold you your Pal Lucky for this job gave you a pinch of gold dust in a jar of urine.”

“I’m sorry?” Newt asked, for what felt like the millionth misunderstanding in his sixty minutes of being exposed to the American language.

Bartleby laughed.

“Felix… uh… Felicia? What’s it called in England?”

“Oh! Felix Felicis!” Newt beamed, so pleased at having figured it out that for one shining moment he forgot that his suitcase full of illegally transported non-indigenous creatures was being pored over in the next room. “I wouldn’t dare drink that! It’s illegal!”

Tina’s jaw dropped before she could catch it.

“Sir, you are greener than fresh corn,” she muttered in disbelief.

“I’m sorry?”

“Why does he keep apologizing?” Tina asked Bartleby.

“Because _he’s guilty_.”

“Guilty people aren’t usually sorry until it’s time to pick a jail sentence.”

“Innocent people don’t have anything to apologize for,” Bartleby argued.

Before the debate could go any further, a smaller version of the glowing red hand the clerk had used to summon Bartleby in the Port Authority building appeared in front of him.

“Rats,” he snapped his fingers. “Let me know how this turns out, will you?”

“Yeah, sure,” Tina nodded as Bartleby disappeared back through the door they’d first come through.

When the two of them were alone, Tina folded her arms and gave Newt another unashamedly analytical once-over.

Newt nervously cleared his throat and stared at a spot on the floor.

“Um, could you tell me where I am, exactly?” He asked.

“You, Mr. Scamander, are in the New York offices of the Department for the Guardianship of the Environment, also the offices of the Department of Enchanted Landmarks, also the offices of the Department of Sea Monster Protection.”

“Oh.”

Desperate for something to take his mind off of the agonizing wait, Newt decided to take in some more details of the room. There was a plaque on one of the walls, made out of glass or some kind of crystal, shaped like an arrowhead and displaying a sea monster carved in bas relief. Beside it was an old photograph, maybe twenty years or so, of a broad-shouldered man with a bushy moustache and small glasses shaking hands with a very fresh-faced Seraphina Picquery. Behind the two of them, a large bull moose and a wispy white patronus in the shape of an eagle interacted cordially.

“Who are they?” Newt asked politely.

Tina followed the direction of his gaze and shook her head in disbelief.

“The woman on the left is the current president of MACUSA, this picture was taken when she worked for our department, and the mundy with her is Teddy Roosevelt. He was the president of the non-magical community.”

“Oh?  I thought the magical community in America was banned from interacting with muggles.”

“That’s a myth that sprang up in Britain after the Revolution,” Tina explained. “There are regulations for obliviating mundies, and a vetting process for mundies who wish to be introduced into the magical community through marriage, but with the number of mixed marriage refugees of magical oppression that this country has taken over the years, it’d be pretty difficult for us to enforce a mandate about interaction levels. It would also be unconstitutional.”

Before Newt could ask any follow-up questions, the door to the inner office opened, and Mac stepped out with Newt’s suitcase in hand. He extended the case towards Newt and waited for the younger man to stand up and take it.

“At this time, Mr. Scamander, I have no cause to detain you or your belongings any longer. Unfortunately, we are unable to prove the presence of illegal substances in your possession—”

“Oh good! Right! So I’ll just be going, then?” Newt smiled, grabbing the suitcase handle and pulling it towards him. It didn’t move easily. Probably because Mac was still holding the handle and not letting go.

“However,” Mac said harshly, “there is a very advanced locking spell on a secondary compartment within this case. Legally, I don’t have sufficient cause to ask you to remove the spell, but I am within my authority to seize both of your passports for the next three days and disallow state-to-state travel without the approval of this department, to which you are expected to return before your departure. I have informed your embassy of these actions, and I have placed a tracking spell on the contents of this case. This means that should _anything_ inside of this suitcase make its way _out of_ this suitcase and to a black market dealer, I will be able to find it. And I will be able to connect it directly with you.”

Having finished his explanation, Mac released the handle.

Newt stumbled backwards with the unexpected lightness of the case. He soon straightened back up and did his best to look like a harassed and inconvenienced British citizen who was planning to make a complaint.

“I wish I could say something polite, but I’m afraid I can’t think of anything.” Newt squared his shoulders, and turned to Tina. “How do I exit this building and where can I get a map?”

“Maybe Miss Goldstein, who was probably about to head to lunch anyway, can escort you to the MACUSA lobby and make certain you’re safely on your way?” Mac suggested coldly.

“Yeah, and maybe if Miss Goldstein does that,” Tina added, “Agent Mac Conmara can speak in her favour during Wednesday’s reinstatement hearing.”

Mac smiled his sardonic smile.

“Maybe.”


	2. The Skyscraper, The Sandwich, and The Baker

“What did you mean about a reinstatement hearing?” Newt asked conversationally as Tina led him down the fresh and modern corridors of the MACUSA building. The walls were decorated with golden sunbursts that changed according to the time of day – people working late often spoke of the elegant peacefulness of the walls turning a twinkling metallic blue and sporting art deco stars.

“None of your business is what I meant,” Tina grumpily stomped along in her wide-legged pyjama style trousers. On the way out she’d pulled a beige striped cardigan over her menswear style button down, and she looked every inch the picture of a modern office girl.

“Thank you, by the way,” Newt said, “Even though I suppose you’re not really trying to help me. I mean, obviously you’re doing this for some personal benefit, but I appreciate your help all the same.”

She stopped and whirled around to face him.

“You listen to me,” she scolded, “all employees of the Magical Congress of the United States of America are courteous. We are helpful. We are polite to foreign visitors and tourists, and you are damn lucky you didn’t waltz into Spain or someplace where the mundies are losing their minds and the wizards are helping them pull the triggers, okay?”

“I know!” Newt nodded emphatically, “I’m glad I’m not in Spain right now! So far, I think my visit to America is going quite well!”

Tina looked at him the way a person looks at a toddler that keeps trying to put a square peg into a triangle shaped hole.

“I’m asking this as a serious question,” she said, “is there something wrong with you?”

“Not really,” Newt told her with unexpected candor. “It’s just that I’ve spent most of the last ten years with various strange creatures, or alone in remote wildernesses waiting for strange creatures to turn up. I don’t get much practice at… socializing with… other humans. I mean, I do have one human friend, sort of. He’s the ghost of an Elizabethan ship captain. He says I should try to put myself out there more.”

It started in her toes. She could feel it rise through her whole body like a burst of champagne bubbles, and all at once she was laughing. Really laughing. Snot maybe came out, she couldn’t quite keep track of what was going on with her face. She might have brayed a little like a donkey.

Newt, at first, was certain she was laughing because he’d done something wrong. Then he went back over what he had just said, and he started to laugh too. Not as much as Tina, but just enough so that when she started to compose herself, she noticed that he’d cracked up and she lost it all over again.

It felt good. Like a nasty toothache disappearing.

Finally, she took a few deep breaths, wiped the tears on the back of her hand and smiled as she said:

“Mr. Scamander, I think you should listen to that ghost.”

With one more refreshing breath, Tina nodded at him and took the lead down the hallway again.

“We’re on the seventeenth floor,” she said with a new note of familiarity, “you’ll need to remember that when you come back on Thursday morning for your passport. If you forget, say you’re looking for Vasily’s office. Don’t try to remember the name of the department, and if you do, don’t be surprised if the person you’re talking to has never heard of it. The conservation movement has only been picking up steam since the 1890’s, and I don’t know about where you come from, but to the American Wizarding community, that’s the blink of an eye. It’s also a pain in the ass.”

She pressed a call button for an ornately caged elevator and waited.

“Actually, I would be very interested to hear about your department’s efforts with mythical creatures. I was under the impression that Americans just sort of… you know…”

“Hunted everything to extinction?”

“Yes.”

Tina sighed.

“It used to be a bigger problem. So did the encroachment of towns and cities on magical locations. It’s hard to keep a secret if a railroad’s running right through it. Right when we began petitioning the mundy government for protection for magically significant areas of land, the mundies themselves were organizing something called the National Parks program. It’s been a stroke of luck for both communities that we can work on these things together. And one of our aims is creating protected habitats for creatures like the sasquatch of the Pacific Northwest, the krakens of New England, the squeak goblins of the Blue Mountains—“

“And the great Thunderbirds?”

Tina frowned.

“The last Thunderbird died a few years ago,” she said. “There was an effort to prevent the loss, but it failed.”

Newt thought about telling her why he’d come to America to begin with, what was in his suitcase and how, actually, the Thunderbird situation might be changing soon.

The elevator arrived, and the moment passed.

“They’re putting elevators in at the Ministry of Magic,” he said instead, stepping into the cab. “It’s quite controversial. It’s the first time a new muggle technology has been integrated into the building in some time.”

“I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that you guys are considering elevators _new_ technology,” Tina decided. “I mean, you still write with feathers and inkpots over there, but you know that elevators have been around for a while, right?”

Newt cleared his throat and tried not to blush.

“This is my first time on one,” he admitted.

When they exited in the lobby, Newt was struck by how different it was from the Ministry of Magic. Everything was newly constructed in ultra-contemporary style. There was glass and steel everywhere, and one area even had a team of house elves painting an enormous mural of art deco wizards and possibly apple trees and Newt thought that one thing was supposed to be some kind of cubist bear. He wasn’t good with art. It looked interesting, though.

“Alright, wait here,” Tina instructed him, leading him to a large triangular fountain made of black marble. “I’m going to get you a map. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t move. You’ll only get yourself into trouble.”

Newt was about to object to being ordered around like a toddler on his first visit to Diagon Alley when he felt his suitcase rumble. It wasn’t supposed to rumble. It wasn’t supposed to feel like something was about to claw its way through the leather, and it _definitely_ wasn’t supposed to feel like the latches were about to snap.

“Thanks, much!” He smiled far too enthusiastically.

Tina nodded with a sort of sympathetic impatience for his social oddities and left him.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no…” he mumbled, sitting on the edge of the fountain and looking at the case. One of the latches had worked its way open. He snapped it shut, and took an unsteady breath.

All of those unlocking charms or security spells or whatever they were that the clerk had used, and who knew what Mac and Vasily had done to it while it was out of sight. Newt was panicked, and a little annoyed. The enchantment on it had not been cheap, and now it was likely ruined.

Newt looked around at all the MACUSA officials bustling by, and wondered if they would notice if he cast a room sealing spell on his suitcase.

Yes. Yes, they would.

“Please stay inside,” he whispered into the side of the case, “all of you, please.”

When he noticed Tina on her way back towards him, he sprang to his feet and held the suitcase behind his back. A sudden burst from inside of it knocked into his knee and he stumbled forward a step.

Tina took the awkward gesture in stride and opened the map of New York so that it hovered in the air in front of them.

“Okay, this is Manhatten,” she circled the long westernmost island with her finger, and the map zoomed in accordingly, “don’t leave it. You’ll get hopelessly lost in Queens, you’ll die in the Bronx, and there’s no reason to ever visit anywhere else. This is where we are now, midtown, and this is Little Italy, they have strong feelings about British magic, but they won’t hang you out to dry if you’re in a jam. This is Chinatown, they _will_ hang you out to dry, but it’s not personal, and you’ll be fine if you just want to visit or shop or get something to eat. Do you like dim sum? This is a good place, I’ll mark this for you. Other side of Chinatown is Hester Street, you just ask anybody on Hester Street – mundy, witch, whatever – for Queenie’s sister and that gets you me. This is not an invitation to bother me, this is for emergencies. Up here is Harlem. The mundies won’t like to see you heading up that way without a reason, so don’t go alone. Hell’s Kitchen is mostly Irish, loads of folk magic, Mac lives there. I mean, you probably never want to see Mac again in your life, but it doesn’t hurt to know these things. And this is the Bowery. This is important. Do not go to the Bowery. Ever. Not for any reason.”

Newt tried not to look overwhelmed and failed miserably.

“Um,” he stammered, pulling a small piece of paper from his pocket, “this is the name of the hotel I was given.”

He handed the address to Tina.

“Wow. Okay. That…” she read it twice just to make sure, “that is a great place to get murdered.”

She looked Newt in the face, took in his slightly out-of-date clothes, the scarf he had not seen fit to replace since leaving school, the general oddity of him, and made up her mind.

“You promise me that your suitcase isn’t full of something terrible?”

“I promise,” Newt said, “it’s full of something very precious. I’m not trying to hide the contents, I’m trying to protect them.”

Tina squinted at him for a few solid seconds.

“I believe you,” she decided.

Then she turned and started heading for the revolving doors that led to the street outside, leaving Newt watching her go in confusion.

“Come on!” She called to him, and he hurried to catch up.

When she entered the revolving door on the lobby side, she was in her office clothes, but when she and Newt passed through to the outside elements, she appeared in a heavy winter coat and elegant cloche hat. Even though it was only midday, the sky was a much darker grey than it had been when Newt had first stepped off the _Golden Hinde_. The air smelled of crisp, clean rain, but it wasn’t falling yet.

“Where are we going?” he asked, looked up at the skeletons of future skyscrapers and the extraordinary height of the ones that had already been built. Automobiles made sounds like matchheads being struck as they flew by, and everywhere something was happening that wasn’t anyone’s business.

“First, lunch. I’m hungry,” Tina announced.

Around two corners and across one street, a delicatessen with cured meats hanging in the window and a highly polished lunch counter waited for them. When Tina opened the door, a tiny silver bell rang and a woman with frizzy grey hair and a white apron tied around her skirt came from the back room to greet them.

“Tina! With a man, no less!” The woman beamed. She wore a high-collared striped shirtwaist and a short dark blue necktie pinned in place. “Close the door, get off your feet! Such a cold day, today, that’s not enough of a coat, young man, you’ll catch your death!”

A gravelly man’s voice called out in Yiddish from the back room.

“It’s Tina Goldstein!” The woman behind the counter called back. “With a young man who has _lovely_ red hair!”

“We just came in for lunch, Mrs. Beiderman,” Tina said patiently, taking a seat at the counter.

“Sneaking out from the office for a little quiet conversation,” Mrs. Beiderman nodded conspiratorially, and smiled at Newt. “Tina is a very good girl. A good sister. Can’t cook, but she can do handiwork, she brings in a salary, everyone in the neighbourhood loves her. I haven’t seen you before, what street do you live on? Who’s your mother?”

“He’s from England. He just got off the boat,” Tina said, realizing with sudden clarity that the convenience of the deli’s location might not make up for the other unforeseen downsides.

Mrs. Beiderman knit her eyebrows and peered at Newt.

“You have work lined up? Who sponsored you? What’s your name?”

“Newt Scamander,” Newt stammered, “I, um, I’m a magizoologist.”

“Ah!” Mrs. Beiderman’s face lit back up, “ _A profession!_ That means you went to the good school! Did you say _Newt_? What kind of meshugene name is _Newt_?”

The gravelly Yiddish voice came from the back room again.

“What?” Mrs. Beiderman yelled at it.

The voice repeated itself, louder and more slowly.

“Mordecai says it’s a tiny lizard,” Mrs. Beiderman said to Tina in a hushed tone, “Who names their son after a tiny lizard?”

“It’s short for Newton,” Newt explained quietly.

“Oh. Huh. Alright. What can I get you two to eat? A nice romantic bowl of soup to warm you up?”

“Mrs. Beiderman. No. He is new in town, someone asked me to make sure he gets settled okay on his first day. That’s all. Get us a couple of pastrami sandwiches, please,” Tina held a hand to her head like she was trying to hide her face in shame. She mouthed _I’m sorry_ at Newt.

Grumbling to herself about how young people don’t appreciate how hard match making is in this day and age, Mrs. Beiderman disappeared into the back.

“That is not a shy woman,” Newt observed quietly.

Tina chuckled.

“No. I should’ve guessed she’d be like this, I usually just pop in here alone and grab something to go,” she rolled her eyes at her lack of foresight. “The food is good, you’ll like it.”

“I’ve never had a pastrami sandwich before.”

“England sounds like such a dreary place.”

“Here we go!” Mrs. Beiderman announced in a sing-song voice, carrying two plates of food and putting them in front of her customers.

Tina looked at the sandwich and shot the older woman an unimpressed expression.

“What?!” Mrs. Beiderman snapped defensively.

“These don’t usually come cut into hearts with little mustard cupids drawn on them.”

“Yes they do! They always do! You just never noticed!” Mrs. Biederman argued, “I have some things to take care of in the back, so you two just enjoy your sandwiches. Talk a little. Take your time.”

Once she and Newt were alone, Tina apologized for Mrs. Beiderman again, and they soon settled into their sandwiches.

“So,” she said after a few bites, “why is a magizoologist heading for San Francisco? You’re not trying to capture the Twins or anything, are you? Because that’s what the last guy was here for and, let me tell you, he got into California in one piece, but he didn’t leave that way.”

“I’m really not planning to disturb any dragons,” Newt said with a miserable note of despair. “I certainly wouldn’t harm them, even if I was going to see them. I’m just passing through San Francisco, it’s a quick stop.”

“Passing through on your way to where exactly?”

“Do you interrogate everyone you meet?” Newt asked conversationally, “Or is this just because I’m under suspicion?”

Tina flinched at the question and looked down at the smeared mustard cupid on her half-eaten sandwich. He looked less like a cherubic herald of love and more like some Lovecraftian abomination now that she’d eaten a quarter of him.

“It’s everyone,” she said glumly. “I used to be an auror. Pretty big league, too. First Jewish agent in the Federal Bureau. I got transferred six months ago, and I guess old habits die hard.”

“Do you mind if I asked what happened?”

Tina sighed and twisted the cap on a nearby salt shaker absent-mindedly.

“I kind of do,” she nodded. “Not because of you, just because don’t like reliving the gory details.”

A thoughtful silence fell over the two of them.

Newt recalled difficult it had been for him at his first position with the Ministry, the Department of House-Elf Relocation. While the Industrial Revolution was happening in the muggle world, the onslaught of strikes and worker’s reforms that came towards the end of the period were trickling into Wizarding society. The department had allegedly been created to prevent the abuse of House Elves and to ensure that they were properly documented, and that free House Elves were given the necessary resources to find suitable employment, but primarily to find new positions for the House Elves of witches and wizards who had died unexpectedly. What the department became, to Newt’s disappointment, was a sort of registry of House Elf lineage used to provide wealthy families with new Elves of desirable “quality” when elderly or abused Elves could no longer manage their workloads. After one week of working there, he’d submitted his first application for a department transfer. It took two years before he was moved to the Beast Division.

“Sometimes,” he said, “no matter how hard we try, we don’t find the place we’re supposed to be. The place we’re supposed to be finds us. And when that’s the case, it takes its own time bloody doing it.”

The last part came out with such unexpected petulance, that Tina smiled again.

“How do you like your sandwich?” She asked cheerfully.

“It’s delicious.”

They chatted amiably about New York’s winter weather and places Newt might like to visit if he got the chance, and both of them conspicuously avoided any more discussion of magical creatures or suitcases or why someone might get transferred from Federal Aurors to Environmental Guardianship.

“I have a surprise for you two!” Mrs. Beiderman’s sing-song voice floated out from the back room, just before she appeared with two small desert plates with tiny sugar-coated pastries on them. “We’ve been trying out some new deserts, and it would mean so, so much to Mordecai and myself if you would try this and tell us what you think!”

She put the pastries on the counter and smiled ever-so-graciously.

Mordecai’s voice shouted something very stern from the other room.

“You mind _your_ own business!” She shouted back at full volume, “You get back to your work!”

Then the gracious smile returned and she handed Newt a small silver fork.

“I cannot believe this,” Tina was blushing as she pushed the plate away.

“Thank you?” Newt said nervously, looking the pastry over.

“Don’t eat it,” Tina warned him. “It’s an engagement cake.”

Mrs. Beiderman looked hurt and scandalized, with a theatrical level of exaggeration that would’ve done a Floradora girl proud.

“Porpentina Goldstein!” She gasped, “Are you suggesting that _I_ would put an illegal spell on food and serve it to unsuspecting customers! Is this what you think of me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, fine, so I try to help! So throw me in jail for it! In the old country, a girl without a mother—“

“Mrs. Beiderman,” Tina said, very fondly, “get rid of these before somebody else sees them.”

Muttering to herself, Mrs. Beiderman took the engagement cakes away and returned to the counter, just as Tina and Newt were having the traditional argument over the bill, with a brown paper bag.

“Newton,” she said, “this is from Mr. Beiderman and me. The boat can be tough on the stomach, and you’re far too thin. Take it. Take it.”

Newt glanced at Tina who nodded very slightly as she took the window of distraction to put money on the counter.

“Thank you, Mrs. Beiderman,” he said, “and thank you for a delicious lunch.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. You come back any time.”

When they left the deli, the wind outside felt twice as sharp. Tina turned her collar up and belted her coat tightly around her, and glanced at Newt’s blue wool coat tentatively.

“Are you going to be warm enough in that?”

“It’s enchanted.”

“Is it?” She asked skeptically.

“I went to Iceland in it,” he laughed. “It’ll be fine.”

She pointed him in the direction they’d be walking, and they strolled along side by side with the expected laziness of two people who’d had a good lunch in a warm place.

“I really am sorry about all of that romance stuff Mrs. Beiderman tried to pull,” Tina said. “She used to be a matchmaker, and everyone who knows her from the old country says she was excellent at it. But most of that kind of magic is a legal grey area here. Love spells are frowned upon.”

“Are they?” Newt asked, “Why?”

“Most mind-control magic was outlawed by President Franklin. ‘ _An unenchanted mind is capable of greater wonders than the most practiced spell_.’ Matchmaking isn’t technically love magic, but it is related to it. A grey area. You do hear terrible stories about girls eating a cake without knowing or drinking the teas out of order and winding up locked into matches with lunatics or werewolves or dybbuks. I don’t know if any of them are true, but better safe than sorry, right?” She shrugged, then eyed the brown paper bag in his hand. “What did you get?”

They stopped on a stretch of sidewalk just in front of a large muggle bank, the kind with enormous columns that made it look like a temple for worshipping money. Newt put his suitcase down on the ground and opened the bag to find a large glass container with a sealed lid.

He was examining the contents, and didn’t even notice the latch undo on the top of his case.

“Whatever it is, it’s white,” he said, puzzled.

“Oh!” Tina took the container from him, opened it, dipped her pinkie finger into the substance inside and tasted it. “Yep. It’s sour cream.”

Newt pulled a face at the combination of the words _sour_ and _cream_.

“What? You don’t like it?” Tina was asking, as the suitcase softly fell onto its side.

“I’ve never heard of it, it sounds disgusting.”

“Give it to me if you’re just going to waste it,” she took the paper bag from him, put the jar back inside and rolled up the top.

“You can have it,” Newt laughed. The suitcase shifted on the ground, ever so slightly.

“You’re a sucker, Scamander. This is the good stuff.”

As all of this was going on, a man named Jacob Kowalski was leaving the bank with suitcase of his own. His was full of decadent pastries and broken dreams, but the outside of it was almost identical to Newt’s.

It had been a very disappointing morning for Jacob, he had booked time off from the cannery – with no small amount of belligerent shouting on the part of his supervisor – so that he could get an appointment with a loan officer.

He wanted, more than anything, to be a baker.

Or, well, he supposed he already _was_ a baker in that he spent nearly all of his time baking or thinking about baking or reading about baking or eating baked things. But it wasn’t his job, and he wanted to make it his job. All he needed was some start up cash.

That was why he’d gone with his drawings and his planned speech and his one good suit and his best, most business-like tie, and been shot down like a grouse in September. He was pretty sure September was grouse season, he actually didn’t know for sure. Whatever month it was they were flying high and then, you know, bang dead. With a heavy sigh, he decided he wasn’t going to dwell on dead birds or horrible dream crushing bankers or anything but what his next move should be.

He started to make his way down the stairs, and about halfway down, slipped on his shoelace and went sliding down the rest of them in a notably painful fashion.

Lying flat on the sidewalk, staring up at the sky, Jacob Kowalski wondered what else could go wrong.

“Sir!” A worried voice said to him, “Sir are you okay?”

Tina was kneeling down next to him, looking very concerned while Newt scrambled to sort out the two suitcases that had gone flying towards the street.

“Yeah,” Jacob groaned, sitting up, bruised all over with his behind feeling as raw as a piece of meat. “It’s just that kind of day.”

“Are you sure?” Tina’s eyes were wide with concern, “We can get you a, whatdoyoucallit, the thing. The automobile that takes you to the hospital?”

“An ambulance?” Jacob asked, smoothing his hair back into place.

“Yes! An ambulance! Do you need an ambulance?”

“I don’t think so.”

A few feet away, at the curb, Newt was looking at two tipped over suitcases that he could not tell apart. The simple solution, he decided, would be to discreetly open one and see what was in it while Tina was making sure the muggle hadn’t perforated an organ.

The trouble would be if he opened his suitcase. The locking charm was thinner than it ought to be, if not worn out completely, and for all he knew, he could pop open the latch and everything inside would burst out onto the street. Then they’d have to obliviate all the muggles walking by or driving by or looking out of windows at them, and it seemed like that was a very high number.

He looked at the two cases and made a split-second decision.

His was almost definitely the more worn out of the two. It had to be. No matter what this muggle’s suitcase had gotten up to, it had never been bashed around by a Runespore or blasted by angry fire crabs, and that was the kind of thing that showed on the leather.

“Is he alright?” Newt asked, bringing the neater of the two cases over to the muggle.

“He _says_ he is,” Tina said trepidatiously, helping Jacob to his feet.

“I think it looked worse than it was,” Jacob nodded dazedly, and gratefully took the suitcase from Newt.

“Can we do anything to help?”

“No, no, I was just telling your lady friend that I’m okay, I’m fine. I’m just going to go home and soak in a hot tub.” Jacob smiled as politely as he could without wincing.

“If you’re sure,” Newt said.

“Thanks to you both, you’ve both been very kind.”

He straightened himself out, smoothing his clothes and straightening his tie, then he turned to walk down the street with as much dignity as he could muster.

“Oh dear,” Newt whispered.

Tina moved her hand in an almost imperceptible gesture, and the massive tear in the seat of Jacob’s pants repaired itself without him ever knowing it had been there. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I switched No-Maj for mundy with zero regret. (I don't know how comfortable it is to say No-Maj with a British accent, but let me tell you, with an American one it feels unnatural and forced, even if you do a kind of mid-Atlantic Katherine Hepburn thing.) Honestly, though, the United States kept so many weird insults from colonial days, I imagine in Boston and Philadelphia they probably still call them muggles. Or 'mawgs' or 'moogies' or some other delightful bastardization. In the 1990's, though, everyone probably had to start calling them 'non-magic wielding persons' because that's just what would've happened.


	4. The Wendigo Club, The Card, and The Overturned Chair

In the legends of King Arthur, the knight Percival had been a naïve country boy who rose to acclaim because of his fortuitous streak of dumb luck. Despite the namesake, it wasn’t the story Malachy Mac Conmara was prone to thinking of whenever he crossed paths with Percival Graves, Director of Magical Security for New York State.

The old tales of Fin MacCumhail told of his three sons and the nightly watches they took to prove their worth. The first son scouted the countryside and brought back for his father a cup that always gave the drinker his fill, no matter what he wished to drink or how much he wished to have. The second son brought home a knife which, when sliced against a bone, yielded enough meat to feed as many as were there, and so the two eldest watchmen brought plenty and prosperity to their father’s kingdom. The third son, in his eagerness to prove his own worth, went out and killed a hag and when she screamed her dying scream, her own sons came to avenge her. The third son killed two of the giants, but the youngest ran away. When he told his father of how he had saved the land from a wicked hag and killed two of her sons, Fin MacCumhail was far from impressed.

‘I wish you had left them all alone,’ Fin said, ‘for the last giant will be back and he will bring nothing but trouble.’

Something about Percival Graves had always reminded Mac of the third son in the story.

Beneath the shadow of the Third Avenue El, the shopfronts and tattoo parlors of the Bowery looked like a derelict carnival. Garish red signs were painted with flaking white, windows proclaimed low prices and even lower standards. A crowd, mostly men in dirt-spattered workmen’s caps, had gathered around the site of the explosion and were arguing among themselves about what had happened.

“It was a green fireball!” Somebody insisted, “I swear it was green!”

“No, it was black smoke! A big huge cloud of the stuff!”

Mac unobtrusively pushed his way to the front of the crowd to see what the hubbub was about.

Between a flophouse and a barber shop, a stack of rubble leaned up against the remains of a back wall. Presumably it had been a building at some point.

“That’s a still blowing up if ever I saw one,” Mac said loudly enough for the mundies around him to hear. “If you try to stretch your jag juice with rubbing alcohol and the kettle blows, the fire turns any number of colours.”

He had no idea if that was true or not, but it sounded reasonable.

Shoving his hands into his pockets, he left the crowd to mull over his suggestion and headed towards the ruined building. A young security officer charged with guarding the barricade and keeping the mundies at a distance held up a hand to stop him. From the current angle, the kid appeared no different than the blue-uniformed flatfoots of the non-magical variety.

“Excuse me, sir, you can’t come through here, that wall is still unsound and—“

Mac smiled. The kid clearly thought he was a mundy. He pulled out his badge and introduced himself:

“Mac Conmara. I was requested.”

“Oh, geez,” the kid replied with a thick Brooklyn accent, “I’m sorry, sir. A G-Wiz, I mean, a Federal Auror, that’s… is this really that important?”

“I don’t know yet,” Mac replied patiently, putting his badge away, “you aren’t letting me through.”

“Sorry, sir! Of course!”

The young officer opened an invisible hole in the barrier, like pushing aside a theater curtain. To the crowd watching, nothing was happening except Mac having a brief conversation with an officer and getting to walk by the barricade in order to cross to the other side of the street. They even saw him head beyond the other curve of the perimeter and into the rest of the crowd that circled the site like the seats of an amphitheatre.

To Mac, walking through the barrier was like stepping from a painting back into reality. The edges of things seemed sharper, the distance realer, the shapes of the universe more natural. When he looked again at the kid who’d let him through, the illusion of the blue uniform had revealed itself and he was wearing the standard greys and blacks of city security.

The building was a mess. The explosion had left huge chunks of stone and brick floating mid-air, miniature versions of the floating mountains of Shangri-La, while a huge cloud of toxic looking green and black dust swirled up and down with almost lung-like regularity. City aurors took turns climbing in and out of an enormous crater in the ground to recast the modified ebublio charms they were using as gas-masks.

“Any ideas what happened?” Mac asked the kid.

“You’ll have to ask Director Graves. He’s down there.”

“Happen to know what this place was?” He pulled something that looked like a white silk handkerchief from the pocket he kept his wand in and a small silver flask from his coat. The flask was filled with clean water he poured onto the piece of silk while he spoke.

“No, sir, they didn’t tell me anything but ‘keep the mundies out’.”

Mac gave the fabric a twist until it was still wet but not sopping.

“A tip for the future,” he said, doubling the handkerchief over to form a large triangle, “nobody ever tells you anything. You always have to make it your business to ask.”

He tied the damp fabric over his mouth and nose like a bandana and headed over to the remains of the building. It was tricking to keep his footing on the sides of the crater while avoiding being clocked in the head by one of the suspended bricks, but he managed.

A couple of the aurors who’d been at city security in Mac’s day gave him friendly nods or waves. The newer ones shot him sidelong glances of concern. By his count, there were about twenty-five officers of Magical Security on scene. A disturbingly high amount.

Percival Graves was in what appeared to be the blast point of whatever spell had gone wrong, barking orders at his people to get samples and take photographs before the evidence dissipated. He was in a long tailored coat with a crisp white lapelled black suit underneath. The shoulders of the coat flared ever so slightly upwards, almost like pauldrons on a suit of armour, and the belled sleeves had a slashed detail that revealed a white lining inside. Mac tried not to think derogatory things about the other man’s somewhat flashy style.

“Is that you, Mac?” Graves called out upon noticing him, “You look like you’re going to rob a train.”

His voice had a distorted, far-away quality from the ebublio mask.

“Well, you did catch me in the middle of my day,” Mac quipped dryly.

Graves pushed through his personnel, who scattered to their tasks, and shook Mac’s hand with friendly enthusiasm.

“Would you look at us, huh? Did you ever think I’d be Director of Security for the whole state? And you! Working your way up the federal ladder! Give it another ten years and you could be running the national show!” Graves said it in a tone that conveyed a warm reunion between old cohorts, but Mac knew how he meant it.

_This is my state, I made it up the ladder, and you might think that because you’re federal you outrank me, but you’re still a small fish in the big boys’ pond._

“Not in another hundred years,” Mac said amiably, “I haven’t got enough imagination for a position like that. Everyone knows I just plod along and stick to the book, and that’s how I like it.”

Both men smiled at one another. The kinds of smiles you might see on a pair of crocodiles on opposite sandbanks.

“Thanks for coming down, surprised the bureau could spare you,” Graves said.

“It’s my lunch hour, but I don’t mind. Not when an old friend needs a hand,” Mac replied. “What is all this? I don’t recognize the spell.”

“That’s because it isn’t one spell, it’s a timed combination,” Graves explained. “We’re calling them Hex Bombs. We’ve been seeing them in random locations throughout the city over the last five months, although now I’m not so sure those locations _were_ random.”

“How do they work?”

“The boys in the ivory tower are still trying to figure that one out, but we think several basic hexes or curses are trapped in an object – best guess is some kind of glass sphere, small though, like an aggie – and set to go off all at once. We’re not sure how it’s done, or why you’d want to use one instead of a more direct destruction spell.”

Once he was told, Mac noticed the different fingerprints of magic colliding with one another. An impressionist painting of ill intent, a seemingly full image from a distance, but in actuality countless dots forming to create an illusion. And, he realized, each dot would need to be numbered, accounted for, and analyzed to see if it could possibly give away the identity of the caster.

“Sounds like something kids might put together without knowing how bad the damage could be,” Mac said, looking up at the debris floating almost thirty feet above street level. Whoever set the thing was lucky it hadn’t hit the track and knocked a train full of mundies into the slums. “Have you talked to the owners of the joke shops?”

Graves looked grim.

“Come here, I want to show you why I asked for you in specific,” he said, stumbling over the busted bricks and past the remnants of old potion making supplies.

He led Mac to the back wall, the only piece of the building that had managed to stay intact, and nodded towards a glowing symbol. It had the appearance of being hastily painted on like graffiti, if someone had learned how to paint with what Mac immediately thought of as _fluid colour_. Shades of blue and green melted into each other, shining like molten metals, coursing through the pattern of the symbol. It was a symbol he knew well.

The triskele. The triple spiral. A mark of ancient Irish magic.

Graves watched as Mac’s eyes narrowed with concern.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Mac said, almost too softly to be heard through the cloth that covered his face.

“My number one theory is we’re looking at the start of a new gang war,” Graves said. “The Banshees, or even a revival of the Rabbits, trying to make a point. I can’t say for certain with only this to go on. I thought, given your history, you could point me in the right direction.”

Mac turned his back on the symbol and took it the remains of the room. It looked like tables had been set up, but he couldn’t really be sure what kind or how many. There was a bar, some potion-making equipment, nothing that really spoke to the nature of the place. Not after whatever combination of hexes had been used had turned most of it into green dust. Unless it had just smashed the furniture and the green dust was what had happened to the people.

“Is this location significant in any way?” He asked Graves.

Graves couldn’t supress a sudden, sharp laugh.

Two of his nearby officers looked at him and Mac with unsettled confusion.

“You finished your work?” Graves called to them.

“No, sir.”

“So get back to it,” he ordered, before clapping a hand on Mac’s shoulder and leading him back towards the edge of the crater. “Come on, let’s get some fresh air. This spell’s starting to wear off, I’m getting light-headed.”

 

****

 

By the time they got to the boarding house on the outskirts of Washington Heights, Newt was getting tired. It had been an overwhelming few hours, and he was surprised to learn how much a person could fit into a day when they weren’t waiting in a mountainside tent, trying to hear a Garuda call. It was a pleasant tiredness, given the complete emotional collapse he was on the brink of before lunch. But he’d enjoyed walking the colourful streets of the unfamiliar city, following Tina around unassuming corners to pop through doors labelled ‘Exit Only’ and finding himself transported to a new part of a new neighbourhood. She’d been annoyed at his reluctance to take the subway, but adapted to it quickly.

“Mr. Zoumadakis is one of the most highly respected landlords in the city,” she said before they knocked on the bright blue door, “he’s got a clean place, everything legal, and he’s got flexible rates. He also likes to keep on MACUSA’s good side, so let me do the haggling. What’s your budget?”

“Is there an amount between _nothing_ and _almost nothing_?” Newt asked.

“I can work with that,” Tina nodded.

The building was a very welcoming sight to Newt with its faux-Georgian façade and peaked roof. The stoop turned sideways to accommodate the narrow road, along which were parked several cloth-top automobiles. Sitting in a row of near-identical buildings, it did nothing to stand out as a boarding house for the magical community, and this reminded Newt of home.

Tina took the knocker in hand and gave a solid, forthright series of taps.

“Did you say Zoumadakis?” Newt said suddenly, “That sounds familiar…”

The door was opened with a welcoming enthusiasm, and the olive-skinned, moustachioed man on the other side said:

“Brooms.”

“I’m sorry?” Newt smiled.

“The family makes brooms, finest tempestarii brooms in all of the Mediterranean,” the man said, reaching out his hand to shake. “Tassos Zoumadakis.”

His hair was white as snow and his handshake was strong.

“Mr. Zoumadakis, I don’t know if you remember me—“ Tina began, but Zoumadakis cut her off with an enthusiastic nod.

“From the inspection, five or six years ago, after that terrible business down the street with the kallikantzaros,” he shuddered. “I get a cold chill thinking about it. I hear you’ve been promoted to the federal branch since then.”

“I’m not here on business,” she said, trying to sidestep the question, “my friend’s in a tricky situation, and I was hoping you had a room available for him.”

“There is _always_ a room available for any friend of yours, dear lady,” Zoumadakis gracefully took her hand and gave it the lightest of kisses.

Newt cleared his throat. He hadn’t done it intentionally, he wasn’t sure why he’d done it at all, but the old Greek gave him an amused wink and ushered the pair into the front parlour.

The house had a wonderful sense of summer to it, despite the miserable weather outside. Every surface gave the sense of being kissed by the sun, a lazy warmth permeating the home’s bright interior. The walls were white, but not wintery, the floors were a warm, dark wood and decorated with coiled rugs, and the air smelled faintly of earthy olive groves and sea salt. It was undeniably well-kept, but it was a bit of a disappointment to Newt, who had been hoping for a cozy English interior to match the exterior architecture of the building.

“I know your rates are more than reasonable,” Tina said, taking off her hat and coat and having a seat, “but I have a problem on my hands. Mr. Scamander is a magizoologist from Britain who’s scheduled to meet with the Department for Guardianship of the Environment on Wednesday morning.”

“Most interesting,” Zoumadakis said, pouring three cups of tea from an ornate silver service. He handed one to Tina and then one to Newt.

“Unfortunately, he’s had a very difficult time at the port, and all he’s got with him are the contents of his suitcase…”

“Meaning very little money, perhaps?”

“Meaning very little money.”

Zoumadakis looked at the tattered suitcase and brushed a knuckle thoughtfully along the side of his mustache.

“Might I have a look inside?” He asked.

“I don’t see why you’d want to,” Newt stammered, feeling his pulse speed up and the drop of sweat starting to form on his temple again.

“The lovely auror has said all you have is what is inside your suitcase, which I of course believe to be true. But she may not know what’s inside. Simply put, a man with a suitcase full of mothballs is in a very different situation than a man with a suitcase full of pearls.”

Newt swallowed hard.

He hadn’t had much trouble with the suitcase since they’d left the MACUSA building, which was certainly heartening, but he was having a terrifying vision of Zoumadakis flipping open the latches only to have his face melted off with a spray of erumpent fluid.

Tina gave him a look that seemed to ask ‘ _if it made it through all the spells that have been cast on it already, what are you worried about?’_ The same look was also managing to ask ‘ _what the hell is in there?’_

Seeing little choice in the matter – they had come all this way, and Tina had repeatedly asserted that he was going to be robbed or killed if he tried to find lodgings on his own – Newt passed the suitcase to Tina who passed it along to Zoumadakis.

“I promise not to gossip about the contents,” Zoumadakis said with a stage whisper, clearly misinterpreting the looks shared between Newt and Tina.

He lay the case across his knees, popped open the top and made a grunt of surprise.

“Pastries?” He said.

“Did you say _pastries_?” Newt asked, confused.

“Yes,” Zoumadakis said, spinning the case to face him. “Pastries.”

Newt sprang to his feet in shock. Inside the suitcase, instead of the dummy panel with his shirts and toothbrush and bedside reading, were twelve squashed but otherwise delicious-looking pastries.

“I don’t…” he started to say, and then it dawned on him. “The muggle! The one who fell down those steps! He has my case by mistake!”

It only took a moment for Tina to understand the implications of what he was saying.

“Oh, Newt!” She groaned, jumping to her feet and putting one hand on her hip and the other to her forehead. “You _didn’t_!”

“Troubles?” Zoumadakis asked.

“Nothing to really worry about,” Tina told him, “just a little mix up. A mundy switched luggage with Mr. Scamander by mistake. I can sort it out.”

“I certainly hope there’s nothing sensitive in that case of yours,” Zoumadakis said.

“Nothing!” Newt and Tina said at the same time.

“Mr. Zoumadakis,” Tina put on her most diplomatic expression, a softening of features that made her look more exhausted than anything else, “will you please look after Mr. Scamander for me? I know my superiors would be extremely grateful, and we can settle the matter of his room and board through official channels tomorrow morning.”

Zoumadakis stroked his moustache thoughtfully.

“Alright,” he said.

“And you,” Tina pointed at Newt’s chest, “stay here. Take a long bath. Have a nice dinner. Don’t go anyplace until you hear from me again.”

“What are you going to do?” Newt asked, not looking at her but at the suitcase full of pastries.

“I’m going to find Mac, and I’m going to ask him to track your suitcase, and then I’m going to get it back from the mundy.”

She threw her coat on and stormed out of the house, slamming the front door out of frustration.

A few seconds later, she stormed back in and took the case full of pastries from Zoumadakis.

“I might need this,” she muttered embarrassedly, opting not to look either man in the face as she left for the second time.

 

****

 

Unfortunately for Tina, Mac would not be easily found. He was, at that very moment, walking down a Bowery street with Percival Graves. Under normal circumstances, the thick scents of pipe smoke and refuse would not have seemed like a refreshing or welcome change, but being in the settling dust of the Hex Bomb had been more uncomfortable than either of them had realized. Mac’s eyes had stung with the comparative cleanliness of the air when he’d stepped outside of the barrier.

“This whole area used to be very upper crust,” Graves said, indicating the neighbourhood with a flourish of his hand.

“So they say,” Mac gave a sidelong glance to a sign announcing a girlie show featuring ‘Egyptian Temptresses.’

For the almost thirty years he’d been living in New York, the Bowery had been a slum. It had more sex workers than the Tenderloin in its heyday, more flophouses than the Lower East Side, and, worryingly, a large number of restaurant suppliers. Like many magically inclined citizens, Mac was loathe to visit it. Not because of its shabby cheapness or any mundane dangers it might pose, but because it had always been a second home to the poisonous young men of the magical community. Pure-blood, fallen noble families, anti-Kabbalist, anti-hoodoo, anti-folk-magic, anti-non-human. Bigots who’d been responsible for some of the most violent riots the city had ever seen. Still, it _had_ been upper crust. A hundred years ago.

“Did you ever hear any stories about John J. Catherine?” Asked Graves.

“One or two. I came away with the impression that he wasn’t very good company,” Mac shrugged. Controversial high society figures were not his subject of interest.

What little he knew about John J. Catherine in particular pertained to the invention of secret curses and the collection of secret artifacts.

“Catherine was probably the darkest wizard New York’s ever seen, outside of the Trench Sisters.” Graves went on, “The man excelled at the unthinkable. Sometime around the 1840’s, he built a private gentleman’s club in the most prestigious neighbourhood of the time. He called it The Wendigo Club. Any conclusions you might draw from the name won’t be far off.”

“I suppose this is the part of the conversation where you reveal that we were just standing in the remains of the former Wendigo Club,” Mac said as they passed a cheap movie house.

Graves nodded, glancing up as the Third Avenue El rattled above them.

“The last monument to John J. Catherine and his work.”

“I don’t see the point,” Mac said as they crossed the street and turned to walk back in the direction of the explosion, “Catherine has been dead for good long while, his ghoulish ‘club’ hasn’t been operating since then, I’m assuming. Why destroy it now? What’s there to gain?”

“That’s what I was hoping _you’d_ tell _me_ ,” Graves admitted. “The last time the Irish gangs went after the Lords of Gotham—“

“The last time it was over something a lot more contentious than a dead necromancer, and it was the Dead Rabbits who did the fighting. They don’t use the triskele,” Mac said with a little more bitterness than he intended.

The Dead Rabbits had been one of the most relentlessly violent magical gangs New York had ever seen. Mostly made up of impoverished young Irish immigrants from Five Points, they had been so careless in their battles against the American-born pureblood Lords of Gotham that even the mundies knew their name. But their grievances hadn’t come from nowhere. At the time the fighting broke, tensions over folk magic regulation had reached a boiling point. Mac had thought that particular fight, like John J. Catherine, was long dead and buried. It hadn’t done much to improve local sentiments.

“Hey, I don’t like these implications any more than you do,” Graves said. “You’re forgetting I’m Irish, too.”

By Mac’s standards, Graves was not Irish. His parents were both born in America, he was born in Connecticut, and he’d never been to the British Isles. But he had an Irish grandmother. This didn’t qualify him to speak on matters pertaining to local Irish issues or the tenements, since he’d spent most of his life between the family’s country home and a Fort Tryon estate where he currently resided.

“I’ll ask around the neighbourhood,” Mac said, meaning Hell’s Kitchen, “but I think it’s a frame up. I can’t see why anyone would put the triskele on a job like this.”

“So what do you want me to do here? Tell everyone that we’re not investigating the first real lead we have on these attacks because Mac doesn’t want people to think badly of old symbols?”

Mac looked around at the mundies starting to peel off from the crowd around the explosion. Whatever rumours _they_ were going to spread had all been chosen, but the magical community hadn’t even gotten started.

“I want a few days to let you know if there’s any reason to make this public,” Mac said. “You go around riling people up, and you’ll have another riot on your hands, or a gang war that could’ve been prevented.”

A chime sounded, clear and pretty, from inside Graves’ waistcoat pocket. He pulled out a copper watch and flipped it open. The face of the clock had been replaced with a short message.

“They need you back at the bureau,” he told Mac. “We’ll talk again later.”

 

****

 

Zoumadakis showed Newt to a small, very cheerful room with a bed, a dresser, and an en-suite that could’ve only been created by magic, given the seeming size of the building and the fact that it contained a sink, a toilet, and a full-sized bathtub.

“Breakfast in the dining room at seven, lunch at one, dinner at eight,” Zoumadakis said. “Anything you need can be found in the top right drawer of the dresser.”

“Very kind of you, I appreciate it,” Newt smiled.

“Hmph,” Zoumadakis grumbled, closing the door behind him as he left.

Newt collapsed in a crumpled heap on the edge of the bed. The mattress was very soft, and his muscles ached. And his skeleton ached. And he felt emotionally drained and like his brain was going to explode with all the horrible possibilities of what was going wrong outside of his control. And he was desperately worried about his suitcase.

He ought to take a nap, he thought, a nice half hour of rest. He might never get the chance to sleep on a decent bed again, just flea-ridden prison cots with rough blankets and no pillows. But his eyelids wouldn’t stay shut.

A bath, then. That wasn’t a bad idea at all, he’d probably never get a decent bath again, either, and the _Golden Hinde_ hadn’t had particularly modern bathing fixtures.

Newt went into the en-suite and remembered that all his things were in the false panel of his suitcase. He was about to head downstairs and ask Mr. Zoumadakis if he had any spare toiletries for guests, when he remembered what he’d been told about the drawer.

He opened it and found a bar of soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a sponge, and a spare face cloth.

An idea occurred to him.

After he cleared the bath items out of the drawer, her closed it very gently and crouched down in front of the dresser.

“Drawer?” He said sweetly, “I know you probably specialize in linens and things – very nice ones – but it would be extremely useful if you could give me suitcase? I need it, you see.”

Hoping with every fiber of his being that this would somehow work, he opened the drawer.

His suitcase was not inside.

But there was a small, white, rectangular card. Newt looked at it, puzzled, knowing for certain that it had not been in there when he cleared the other things away.

In very neat, deep black ink, two words appeared:

 

**A** **κ** **o** **λ** **o** **ύθησέ** **με**

 

Newt blinked at the writing, hoping fervently that he wasn’t looking at the Greek words for ‘I have contacted the police.’ He was more than a little relieved when the texted morphed into its English translation:

 

**Follow Me**

 

With nothing to lose, Newt picked up the card for a closer look. As soon as it was out of the drawer and in his hand, the writing again changed. This time, the card went blank except for a pair of footprints that pointed on a diagonal towards the door, and winked on and off the stiff paper as though they were walking.

Newt decided to walk to the door to see what would happen. When he got there, the footprints were swapped out for a tiny, animated illustration of an Ancient Greek warrior opening a very modern-looking door. So Newt turned the knob and stepped into the hallway.

He followed the card, stepping very lightly to avoid alerting Mr. Zoumadakis of what he was up to, out of the front door and onto the sidewalk. When the footsteps started to point him east instead of south, he was surprised. Surely the suitcase would be back towards the direction of the bank? But, for some reason that wouldn’t have made sense if he really thought about it, he decided that the card had a better geographical grasp of Manhattan than he did, and so east he went.

As he passed muggles on the sidewalk, he did his best to look like he was trying to find a specific address on his card, and none of them paid him much mind. He moved as quickly as he could manage, occasionally glancing up to make sure he wasn’t flattened by an oncoming milk truck, and noticed that he was heading into a commercial area where the family businesses had names like Kaczka Pawn Brokers and Maslanka’s Ice Cream Parlour.

He could hear the laughter of children playing in one of the alleyways, and wondered what time in the afternoon it was.

“Sir!” A voice called to him. “Excuse me, sir!”

Newt quickly pocketed his card and looked up to see a muggle police officer in a blue uniform wave him over. Next to him, an elderly woman with curlers in her hair and slippers on her feet was clutching her housecoat tight around her chest to keep out the cold. Newt looked at the officer with polite enquiry as he walked over.

“Something the matter, officer?” Newt asked.

“Do you speak Polish?”

“No, I’m afraid not. I’m just passing through the neighbourhood,” Newt explained apologetically.

“Me too,” the officer grumbled, “my shift’s almost up, but she seems to be in distress about _something_.”

The group of children came running out of the alley in a burst of laughter, and the old woman in her house coat called them over and told them something in Polish.

“She says we’re supposed to tell you what she’s saying,” the leader of the children, a little girl with blonde braids tied in green ribbon, said to the policeman.

Newt and the officer exchanged friendly nods, and Newt slipped a few steps away so he could pull out the card and get his bearings again. Behind him, he could hear the old woman speaking quite animatedly, and then the little girl reporting:

“She says animals came out of the upstairs apartment. Like a safari. There was a rhino with a flaming horn and a white monkey and a platypus and a giant rat made of pink skin…”

Newt froze and his eyes went wide with panic. He turned slowly back towards the children and the old woman.

“What does she mean?” The policeman was asking in confusion.

“It’s real funny!” The little girl reported. “She says she was washing the stairs in front of her apartment and she heard a big crash and saw the wall fall down outside the window, then she saw the rhino and all the other things go running towards the park, and she went for help.”

“A… _rhino_?” The policeman said slowly.

There was a direct correlation between the apartment building the old woman was gesturing towards and the direction the card was telling Newt to go. He decided it was very important to get there before the muggle policeman, and so he started hurrying towards it.

The card led him to the third floor of the building, where a door was hanging off its hinges. Assuming that this must be the right place, Newt carefully pushed his way into the room. The hinges creaked a long, low creak.

He found a small, one-room apartment with a bed with a suitcase on it, a tipped over chair, a lamp, and a gaping void with jagged edges showing off the bleak November sky.

Admittedly, Newt had not been in many muggle apartments, but he was fairly certain they were supposed to have walls. He took his wand and cast a quick spell to repair the damage, hopefully in time to have prevented the neighbours from noticing. Apart from the old woman downstairs, but he’d have to deal with her later.

“ _Oh, god, is the wall fixing itself?_ ” A rather distressed voice asked from under the chair.

Newt realized with a start that the man he’d met outside the bank was trapped, and he quickly lifted the chair and helped the man up.

“I’m so terribly sorry about this,” Newt said earnestly, “are you alright?”

Jacob dazedly found his feet, then looked at Newt.

“You’re the guy.”

“That’s right.”

“From outside the bank.”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m afraid I accidentally switched our suitcases when they got knocked over. I’m terribly sorry.” He gave another wave of his wand and a soft incantation that fixed the broken door and put all the furniture right.

“Switched our…?” At first, Jacob looked confused. Then realization dawned on him and his eyes went wide as saucers. “That’s _your_ suitcase! This is _your_ fault! The little thing that came out of the egg and the big thing that destroyed my room, and the thing that bit me! What _were_ all those things? Who are you?”

“Did you say one of them bit you?” Newt asked urgently. “Which one?”

“The, uh, the weird looking one.”

There was a pause.

“I’m going to need you to be more specific.”

“It was pink and really ugly?”

“The murtlap?”

Now it was Jacob’s turn to look unimpressed.

“Are you asking me to _correctly identify_ the rabid animal that jumped out of your suitcase?”

“It’s not rabid, I assure you, but I would like to see the bite, please.”

If he had been less dazed, less depressed about his bad luck with the bank, less overwhelmed by walls magically fixing themselves, Jacob Kowalski might have decided that whatever was going on was something to be as far away from as possible. But he wasn’t thinking clearly and his neck was itchy and this English guy seemed like _some_ kind of expert.

“I can’t really see it,” Jacob said, turning his head and angling his neck towards Newt, “but it’s on the back but more like the side? The side-back of my neck?”

“The good news is these kinds of bites usually clear up in a matter of minutes,” Newt said cheerfully as he started to take a look. “Oh. Oh dear.”

“Oh dear?” Jacob gulped. “Why are you saying that? What’s wrong? Oh god, am I going to die?”

“No! Nothing like that! It wasn’t a big _oh dear_ …”

“So it was a little _oh dear_?”

“More like a medium _oh dear_ ,” Newt said. Backing away from the bite, sitting on the edge of the bed and mulling things over. “It is a complication.”

“What kind of complication?” Jacob asked, tipping the chair right side up and taking a seat of his own.

“I’m a wizard, you see, and this suitcase – my suitcase – carries several species of fantastic creature that I’m not legally allowed to bring into America, but all of which are invaluable to my research or in need of sheltered care. And now it appears several of them have escaped, which is a nuisance on its own, but I’ve also got to look after you. You should be observed by someone familiar with murtlap bites and treatments for the next twenty-four hours, because it looks like you’re having a _mild_ allergic reaction. So I can’t just obliviate you.”

Jacob nodded slowly, deeply hoping he hadn’t just heard the word _obliterate_.

“So, what you’re telling me is you’re a crazy person and I’m probably dreaming,” he decided.

“I promise you, by the end of tomorrow evening, you won’t remember any of this,” Newt said reassuringly. “Now, how many creatures escaped? Do you happen to know?”

“Uh, the little one that hatched, the yeti looking one, the one that stole all my spoons before it left, the big one that wrecked the wall, and the ugly one that bit me, and I think that’s it.”

“That’s… manageable,” Newt nodded. “You’re going to have to stay with me while I find my creatures so that I can keep an eye on your bite, but it probably won’t be too much trouble.”

“Is it optional? What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

 “Flames shooting out of your anus.”

“I will stick with you while you find your creatures. It probably won’t be too much trouble.”

“Excellent!” Newt pursed his lips, “The only thing I’m not sure of is how we’re going to find them.”

The two of them sat in silence, contemplating. Newt trying to find the quickest solution for rounding up his creatures, Jacob trying to wrap his head around what, exactly, was going on.

“Aha!” Newt smiled, pulling the card from the boarding house dresser out of his pocket, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this right away! Card, can you please guide me to the erumpent who has escaped my case?”

The card flashed an illustration of Newt’s suitcase.

“Yes, I know, but I’ve found that now. I need to find something else. Something that was _in_ the suitcase.”

The card went blank for a moment, then the little Greek warrior from before appeared. He shrugged and shook his head as though there was nothing he could do, then enthusiastically picked up a suitcase and gave Newt a thumbs up.

Jacob watched the other man talk to the tiny piece of paper and tried not to interrupt by running away as fast as he could.

“I know, you’ve done very well, but I need to find my creatures before things get out of hand, can’t you do anything to help?” Newt was saying to the card.

The Greek warrior illustration gave Newt another sympathetic expression, then disappeared.

“Well,” Newt said to Jacob, “it was worth trying.”

“Yeah, no, sure, of course it was. So, is there somebody who looks after you that we should maybe call? Like a senior wizard who could help out here and clarify the situation a little bit?”

“You’re right. We’re going to have to go to MACUSA. I’ll just have to take my medicine.”

“You forgot to take your medicine?” Jacob said, an unexpected note of relief in his voice, “That’s something I can understand! You shouldn’t have done that, you probably need it. Let’s go take care of it and maybe somebody at this hospital can take a look at my bite and tell me what’s actually happening, and we’ll both be happy.”

Newt sighed with resignation.

“I suppose it’s the best thing.”

He waved his wand, and around them the room redecorated itself to a pristine state, then he grabbed the lapel of Jacob’s jacket with one hand and his suitcase with the other. A quick flourish apparated them into a back alley near to the bank where they’d first crossed paths.

Upon processing the quick succession of events and his new location, Jacob wheezed out:

“You’re a wizard, holy shit, holy shit.”

“I told you that already,” Newt said, looking concerned.

He raised his wand in front of Jacob’s face.

The poor man was terrified that Newt was about to turn him into a toad or blast him with a lightning bolt for being slow on the uptake. In the cozy confines of his apartment, the whole thing had felt like a fever dream colliding with some bad shrimp; he could’ve talked himself out of believing most of it the next morning. He would’ve decided a rat bit him while he was sleeping and given him some crazy hallucinogenic germs and then he would’ve gone to a doctor.

But now this real-life wizard was probably going to turn him to stone and donate him as a piece of art to the Rockefeller collection.

“Follow the wand with your eyes,” Newt asked, like a doctor giving a physical.

Jacob did as he was told, watching it move from left to right and back again.

“Good. If you feel suddenly feverish or, ah, flatulent, tell me right away,” Newt said, putting his wand away. “And if you have any more of these short term memory lapses, I’ll have to put you in the suitcase with a cold compress on your head.”

“I don’t want to go in the suitcase. I’m too big,” Jacob said dazedly.

“Oh, don’t be silly! There’s plenty of room, I’d just have to shift a few things around!” He waved the concern off and walked out onto the busy sidewalk to get his bearings.

All he had to do was find the cluster of skyscrapers and pick the right one. Or at least find the delicatessen, because he was sure that Mrs. Beiderman would give him directions. He turned to his right and nothing looked familiar. Then he turned to his left and nothing looked familiar.

“Oh dear,” he said quietly to himself.

“A big _oh dear_ , or a little _oh dear_ , or a medium one?” Jacob asked.

“I can’t remember where exactly MACUSA… is. It’s in a skyscraper, with a lot of silver and glass and a sort of modernist sculpture nearby. You wouldn’t happen to know it?”

“That’s a description of all the skyscrapers.”

“I was worried about that,” Newt muttered, and patted his pockets for the map Tina had given him.

He opened it and found that the neighbourhoods she’d marked out for him were still clearly noted, as well as the few local landmarks she’d thought might be of interest, but he couldn’t see the MACUSA building.

“She said it was in Midtown,” he mentioned to Jacob. “Would that help?”

“…No.”

“Oh! Here! Hester Street!” Newt said, remembering his advice for emergencies. “If you can get us there, I can find Tina, and then we’ll be moving along nicely.”

“You want to go to Hester Street?” Jacob said with an amused grin. “Alright. I’ll take you to Hester Street, and I’ll get to see whatever nutzo thing happens there, and maybe I’ll start getting used to it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, if that Greek was wrong (I tried really hard to make sure it wasn't) please help me out. Second, a nice tall glass of tanis root tea if you spotted the "Rosemary's Baby" reference!
> 
> The Percival Graves storyline has the biggest changes to it, because internal tensions in New York were pretty high during the 1920's and I really want to reflect what was going on at street-level America. Credence is turning up, Grindlewald is turning up, but everything jigsaws in together a little differently. I'm going to do my best to make it interesting, and I hope you like it.


End file.
